Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Punctuation Marks

Starting point is 00:00:00 There once was a time when languages had no punctuation. Not only did they not have punctuation, but they also didn't even have spaces between words, and in some cases they didn't even use vowels. It was extremely confusing if you were trying to read something, so eventually people began inserting marks and characters into text to make it easier to read. Learn more about punctuation marks, and how and why they were developed on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? throughline is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

Starting point is 00:00:48 It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. Language developed as a tool for oral communication. Humans were speaking with each other long before anyone developed a system to record words. When written language was developed, it was only known by. very few people, and usually just to record basic information. For the purposes of this episode, I'm only going to be focusing on languages that use

Starting point is 00:01:22 alphabets, not logographic systems like Chinese, which are a totally different thing. And eventually I'll just focus on English, which is the language that all of you listening know. The first writing systems were extremely basic. Some of the first alphabetic writing systems such as Phoenician and Hebrew didn't have lowercase letters, didn't use spaces between words, and didn't even use vowels. It is entirely possible to read something written without spaces, lowercase letters, or vowels. However, it's very slow-going, and it's very easy to confuse what is being said.

Starting point is 00:01:54 This type of writing became known as Scriptura Continua. In the ancient world, there were, relatively speaking, few written documents. It was expected that it would take time to read a scroll, and it wasn't something that you would fully grasp on the first read-through. There once was a second-century Roman writer by the name of Aulus Gellius, who refused to read out loud a manuscript that he had never read before because he said he would mangle the meaning. So he gave the document to a bystander who could read, and the bystander did exactly that. One of the first people to attempt to use something like punctuation was the Greek scholar Aristophanes

Starting point is 00:02:29 of Byzantium. He was the head librarian at the Library of Alexandria and was responsible for the many scrolls that the library held. He developed a system of dots that could be inserted into text, which would indicate where to pause when speaking. The dot was the only symbol he used, but he used it in three different ways. He could be placed low, medium, or high, depending on how it was supposed to be used. A low dot had the same function as a comma. A middle dot was similar to a colon, and a high dot was similar to a period. The marks created by Aristophanes of Byzantium weren't really punctuation. They were more designed for orators that were reading text, not denoting any sort of grammar. Despite copying many Greek cultural innovations,

Starting point is 00:03:11 the Romans never really adopted Aristophanes system universally. That was because the written word was subordinate to the spoken word to the Romans. They occasionally used some marks to indicate breaks, but there was no consistency with its usage. It was until the rise of Christianity that writing became more important. The Christians based their faith on written text, in particular the Bible. So the creation and duplication were of central importance. In the 7th century, Irish and Anglo-Saxon monks whose native language wasn't based on land, began using spaces between their words.

Starting point is 00:03:44 The Bishop Isidore of Seville adopted a similar system to Aristophanes where he would use dots to represent pauses, but it wasn't the same system. Many scribes developed their own system for creating breaks, so what sort of punctuation marks existed in a text depended upon who was doing the writing. What really changed everything was the advent of the printing press and movable type. With movable type, there was now a need for a consistent standard for punctuation. marks and text. Standard-width text made it easier to read something without practice to decipher what the text meant. There was now a need to have a way to indicate where sentences ended and where there were

Starting point is 00:04:22 pauses. The printer who was credited with the creation of modern punctuation marks is Aldus Menutzius. Manutzius was a printer in Venice, who popularized the use of a period, or a full stop, as it's known in the Commonwealth, to end a sentence. He invented the semicolon, created the modern use of the comma, and popularize the use of parentheses. Each punctuation mark has a slightly different history and a different reason for its development. So, here's a rundown of the most popular punctuation marks and how they were developed. As I just mentioned, the period, or full stop, is the oldest punctuation mark. The original use of a dot aligned with the bottom of the letters was used as a comeda,

Starting point is 00:05:01 and it was Ilyzidore of Seville that began using an essay-sentence stop. The word period comes from the Latin, Peridose. As we'll see, the period, or really just a dot, became the foundation for many other punctuation marks. The other big punctuation mark is the comma. The comma actually evolved from a mark known as the Virgula Suspensiva, which began seeing use in the 12th century. The Vergula Suspensiva was a slash with a dot in the middle, and the Vergula Suspensiva

Starting point is 00:05:30 had the same function as a comma. Over time, the dot on the slash kept moving down until it became a dot with a tail below it, which was of course created by Aldous Manus Manusius. I, of course, can't talk about the comma without mentioning one of the most heated debates in the world of grammar, the Oxford or Serial comma. An Oxford comma is the comma that is placed before the word and in a list in a sentence. Personally, I use the Oxford comma because it can clarify potential confusion. And to be completely honest, I don't really understand the argument against it or why people would feel so strongly about it. The colon is based on Aristophanes' middle dot. It was intended to be a pause and

Starting point is 00:06:12 length between a comma and a period. It was eventually replaced with two dots instead of a middle dot. For a time, the colon was actually used to indicate the end of a sentence before it was replaced by the period. In the 17th century, in English, there was a use of a colon followed by a dash to indicate an extended pause. This symbol actually appeared in some very early printings of Shakespeare. The symbol was colloquially known as the dog's bollocks, and it fell out a use. The semicolon was also developed by Aldous Manusius. It was originally intended to be an intermediate pause between a comma and a colon, which is why it visually consists of a mix between a comma and a colon.

Starting point is 00:06:52 The modern apostrophe came from, you guessed it, the print shop of Aldous Manusius. Its original use was what was called the French style. The French style is the use of an apostrophe. to replace a sound, usually in a vowel in the articles Lee or La. If you see something spelled L-apostrophe something, that's French, that's the French style. This was eventually adopted in English in similar use for removing vowels, such as the word I'm, a contraction of I am, and it was later adopted for all contractions and then for possessives. The exclamation point was first developed in English in the 16th century. It was originally just a straight line over a period.

Starting point is 00:07:32 It was known as a point of admiration or a mark of admiration, and the term exclamation point or exclamation mark didn't actually come into use until the 19th century. Many of the first typewriters didn't actually have an exclamation point key. To create an exclamation point, you had to type a period and then backspace and type an apostrophe over the period. The question mark is actually older than many of the other punctuation marks. The first known use of a mark to indicate a question comes from a fifth. century, Syriac Bible, and it was simply a double dot used at the start of a sentence. In the 8th century, there was a symbol called a lightning flash, which was like the modern tilde symbol, which is a horizontal wavy line. This symbol was eventually turned vertically,

Starting point is 00:08:18 curved even more, and then placed over a period. The question mark has been used in different ways in different languages. In Spanish, an upside-down question mark is placed at the start of a sentence, and in Arabic, a mere image question mark is used. Parentheses, also known as brackets, were also first used by Aldous Manusius. They were the rounded brackets that were designed to look like the Crescent Moon. Since then, there have been a host of similar brackets which serve similar purposes, including square brackets, angled brackets, and curly brackets. Quotation marks were developed by the ancient Greeks,

Starting point is 00:08:51 and then a similar system was adopted by Isidore of Seville to indicate what parts of a manuscript actually came from the Bible. The double-apostrophe quotation mark came into use in Italy in the 15th century, and in the 19th century variations in the quotation mark developed in different countries. For the most part, these were just differences in typography with straight versus curly quotation marks and the direction they pointed. What I've just outlined are most of the punctuation marquees on your keyboard, and many of the other symbols I've discussed on a previous episode on the origins of math symbols. There are, however, punctuation marks that are less popular

Starting point is 00:09:26 that have been proposed. One such symbol is the Interrobang. The Intero Bang is a combination of an exclamation point and a question mark, and it's literally created by superimposing one over the other. The Intero Bang was created by an American advertising executive Martin Specter in 1962. He proposed a single punctuation mark for a surprised question, instead of putting an exclamation point next to a question mark. The Intero bang is actually part of the Unicode character set and can be found in several popular fonts. Two other recent innovations are the question comma and the exclamation comma. They're basically the same as the question mark or an exclamation mark,

Starting point is 00:10:07 except that they're over a comma instead of a period. They were designed for use inside of a sentence like a comma. These symbols never caught on, and as far as I know, they aren't part of any font set, ASCII, or Unicode. Punctuation marks are so integrated into our language, it would be very strange if we didn't use them. Imagine how difficult and confusing it would be to read if there were no periods or commas. The development of punctuation marks maybe isn't as important as the development of the alphabet.

Starting point is 00:10:35 But at the same time, it probably also isn't too far behind. Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast. The executive producer is Darcy Adams. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. I just wanted to extend a big thank you to everyone who is supporting the show over at patreon.com. I have show merchandise available there, including hoodies, t-shirts, and stickers. Plus, it really just helps me get this show out every single day, including, of course, weekends and holidays. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostogram, you too can have it read on the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Punctuation Marks

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